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Part III: Chapter 8

1/1/13

Louisville

A sharp rap came at the doorframe. “Knock, knock.”

I looked up from my phone. Mikey filled the doorway of my hospital room, collar of his immense black parka turned up, tired eyes shaded by a straight-billed Chiefs cap. He looked slightly better than me; I was wearing yesterday’s sweater and slacks, yesterday’s underwear, yesterday’s puked-on shoes. Sending someone over to the apartment for something besides a hospital gown had been the last thing on my mind.

They’d asked me if there was anyone they could call. I’d called a damn coworker.

“Uh…happy new year?” he said with a shrug.

I had yet to figure out what was happy about it. I hadn’t even left the room, and I already understood how people came to abuse the Vicodin I’d been prescribed. The tiny incision was throbbing, and I hadn’t eaten anything, still a little woozy from the anesthesia. And those were just my physical ailments.

I forced a smile that felt foreign to my face. “Something like that, I guess. Are you my chariot?”

Mikey nodded. “Dave texted me. We’re nothing if not one big, happy, fucked-up newsroom family, right?” He grinned down at me, and I felt myself thaw a little. “Got your car keys?”

“Yep.” I hauled myself just far enough out of the ridiculously comfortable armchair to grab my purse and rifle through it. My fingers closed around my key ring, and I fished it out and tossed it to Mikey.

“Cool. The wife and bambino are downstairs. We’ll go get your car and come back for you.” Mikey pocketed my keys. He winked at me. “I’m not gonna lie, we might keep that whip.”

I rolled my eyes. “You know, they’ve already been in here with the discharge paperwork. I have a prescription that needs filling. I’m sure you have a hangover that needs nursing.”

Mikey waved a dismissive hand. “Please. We couldn’t get a sitter. I fell asleep in front of the DVR at 10:45. Anyway…” He reached into the depths of his other pocket and produced a can of Diet Coke, setting it on the counter just inside the room. “This should help.”

I eyed the soda, the elixir of gods at this moment. “You’re really going to make my invalid ass walk over there?”

“If you’re being sent home, you can walk.” Mikey rolled his eyes as he backed out of the room. “See you soon.”

I pushed myself out of the armchair and walked slowly, carefully, across the room. It was a small incision, barely a hiccup of a surgery on paper, the doctor had said, but something about being hospitalized made me feel physically fragile. I hoped I’d be able to get over that shit when I got home.

Emotionally fragile, that was another story.

I popped open the Diet Coke and took a sip. It tasted terrible, so terrible that I recoiled. I held the can out and checked the expiration date. No, that wasn’t it. I took another sip. It tasted like I imagined pure gasoline might.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I muttered, chucking the nearly full can into the wastebasket.

A nurse, very young, wearing purple scrubs and an auburn ponytail, appeared in the doorway with a wheelchair. “Ready to head downstairs?” she asked brightly.

I grabbed my purse and the thick folder the doctor had given me, plopping into the wheelchair without a word. The nurse shouldered my messenger bag, which I wasn’t allowed to carry for a few days, and we headed for the hospital pharmacy in stony silence.

In my car, with Mikey behind the wheel and his wife behind us in their Camry, I said, “Hey, when you had your appendix out, did…uh, random stuff not taste right afterward?”

Mikey nodded. “Oh yeah. The anesthetic did weird shit to me. Fast food and soda sounded like the worst thing in the world for, like, a month.” He threw me a sheepish sidelong glance. “I take it that Diet Coke was the wrong call?”

I looked out the window. “Hmm. You could say that.” I could hardly imagine what I would do without Diet Coke for a month. Talk about adding insult to injury.

“It’ll come back to you.” I heard the grin in his voice, as if he’d read my mind. “You can’t stay on that wagon forever.”

We rode to my apartment in near-silence, the ‘90s station playing softly on the radio. My thoughts were too suffocating for me to speak.

It occurred to me that Mikey and our colleagues might very well think that I’d had my appendix out. I didn’t correct him. It was pretty much the same incision, the doctor had said, pretty much the same physical recovery time. I could go back to work tomorrow if I wanted, though I had no idea why I would. I’d texted Dave that morning that I’d be out the rest of the week. “Lady problems,” I’d typed vaguely. “Appreciate you not saying anything to the gang. All is fine now.”

The doctor had said it was an ectopic pregnancy, a fetus growing in my fallopian tube. Five weeks. I’d known right away it had happened at Thanksgiving. It had never made it to my uterus. It would never draw breath. They’d taken it out with a laparascopy, an incision shorter than my thumb.

Just one of those things. No way to save the… I couldn’t think of it as a baby. It had been doomed from the start. I’d been allowed to believe I was having a baby for exactly half a second. It was best, I figured, to assume I’d never been having one at all. It would make me feel better about all the drinking I’d done in those five weeks, my usual poor journalist habits, my solitary little life with my absentee boyfriend.

An ectopic pregnancy. Did it even count as a miscarriage? Especially if I hadn’t known I was pregnant? It wasn’t a dead idea for me to grieve. It was an idea that had never existed at all. It had to be.

I wondered how I would tell Brian. I wondered what the point would be. Why worry him all the way over there? I’d called my mom this morning, and it had taken every ounce of my rhetorical skill to convince her not to take off work and drive back down to Louisville. What would it accomplish to tell Brian? He’d be stuck in England, or he’d leave the work he so prized and had thought it so important to fly back early for. Neither seemed to make sense. By the time I saw him next, it would be as if nothing had ever happened. As far as he would be concerned, it never had.

We pulled up in the parking lot of my apartment building. Someone had hammered a black plastic E, stolen from a restaurant marquee or something, into the missing letter space in ST. THER SA SCHOOL. What a strange idea of vandalism. What a strange town I lived in.

Mikey parked in my space and handed me the keys. “So this is where the magic happens, huh?”

I rolled my eyes and climbed out of the car. “Oh, cram it. And get my bag. I’m not supposed to lift it.”

Mikey smirked. “I know those feels.”

His wife was surprisingly small and pretty, solicitous, holding doors and flipping on lights, a dark-haired toddler on her hip. They lingered beside Mikey in the doorway after I walked in, and I could feel all of their eyes on me, uncertain.

I forced another smile. “Thanks for everything, guys. Sorry your 2013 had to start this way.”

Mikey shrugged. “Shit happens. We’re a big, happy, fucked-up newsroom family. None of us were gonna leave you hanging.”

“If you need anything…” Mikey’s wife jerked a thumb at him.

I nodded, and the trio ducked out, leaving my messenger bag next to the door as they closed it.

The apartment felt both very large and very small. The silence was deafening. The hours stretched out before me, endless. It was 11 hours and 13 minutes into 2013, the first new year in my boyfriend’s city. I’d never felt so alone.

I walked to the bedroom, crawled fully clothed into bed, and was asleep in seconds.



Bzzzz. Bzzzz. “I just want you to know that I’ve been fighting to let you go…

The ringing phone startled me out of my slumber. It was in my purse in the living room. I sighed and rolled over. I had no idea what time it was; I’d never unpacked my alarm clock. The sun slanted through the windows at a different angle from when I’d fallen asleep.

The ringing fell silent – then resumed five seconds later.

“Ugggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” I mumbled, dragging myself out of bed. My stomach growled angrily, my incision sore again. I needed food. I needed a couple of Vicodin. I needed Brian to stop calling me. The sound of his ringtone, the stupid grin on my phone’s brand-new screen, made my heart constrict so that I could hardly breathe.

I swiped my thumb across the screen and sank onto the couch. “H’lo?”

Brian’s voice filled my ear. “Hey, sweet girl. Happy New Year.”

In spite of myself and my pounding heart, I couldn’t help but smile. “Hi.”

“I miss you. I’m sorry we didn’t talk last night,” he went on. His voice was warm, and yet... “When it was midnight here, I figured you were still at work.”

“Yeah, and I figured when it was midnight here, that was a little early to call you,” I lied through my teeth. I hadn’t made it anywhere near midnight last night. My surgery had been a little before 7, and I’d been so groggy from the anesthesia that I’d drifted in and out of sleep for hours.

He was silent for a long moment. When at last he spoke, his voice was strained, a bit rueful. “But you weren’t at work, were you?”

I didn’t answer. My heart clenched, then sped up. Heat flashed through my face and ears.

“Your mom left me a voicemail about an hour ago,” he said. “I didn’t even know she had my number. She…she wanted to make sure you’d gotten home from the hospital OK and you were feeling OK, and then she remembered I wasn’t there. I think she was a little pissed about that part.”

“Probably,” I mumbled. Mom had taken Brian flying back early perhaps even more personally than I had. She was the classic mother bear. I looked down at my phone. I’d been asleep for four and a half hours. Mom had left me a voicemail two hours ago.

“Meg…” Brian took a deep breath. “What were you doing in the hospital?”

A ragged sigh escaped me. I could barely hear my own voice when I spoke. My heart was pounding so hard that it shook my voice. “I, um, I had emergency surgery last night.”

“Surgery? What kind of surgery?” Concern filled his voice, but now a sharp edge crept in with it. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“What good would that have done?” I snapped. “Anyway, it wasn’t that big of a procedure. They just did a laparascopy. A little, tiny incision. They only kept me overnight. I’m home now. I feel fine,” I lied.

“Meg, what kind of surgery was it?” Brian persisted.

I could barely speak to answer him. The words I couldn’t quite bring myself to contemplate had solidified into a lump into my throat, held together by my tears.

“Ihadanectopicpregnancy,” I mumbled.

Dead silence filled the air again for a solid minute. I couldn’t even hear him breathing. Finally, he broke the silence, in the tiniest, saddest voice I’d ever heard from him. “You were pregnant?”

I sighed. My chest was tight, my throat burning. “It was news to me, too.”

“How far along were you?”

“The doctor said five weeks. I guess it happened at Thanksgiving.” My eyes were suddenly brimming in spite of myself. “I had no idea.”

A sniffle came from the other end, not quite muffled. Brian’s voice was shaking. “And…and you lost it?”

I swiped at my eyes, irritated with myself for crying. “I never had it to begin with,” I said, a bit more sharply than I’d intended. “As soon as he told me I was pregnant, he told me it was an ectopic pregnancy.”

“Didn’t you know?” He sniffled again. “That you were pregnant, I mean?”

“I’m a little busy to sit around waiting to bleed,” I snapped, instantly sorry I’d done it – but not sorry enough to say so.

Brian cleared his throat. His voice was steadier now. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“What the hell good would it have done, Brian? You’re on the other side of the world. Were you just going to fly back?”

“Well, I—”

“No, you weren’t,” I plowed on. “You need to be where you are. Isn’t that what you said? You couldn’t have gotten here in time. I was always going to be alone for this.”

“You’re not alone,” Brian interjected. “That was my baby, too.”

It wasn’t a baby!” I shouted, my voice breaking on the last word. I drew in a sharp breath on a sob. “It wasn’t a baby,” I repeated, more quietly. “Don’t say it was. Don’t make this worse. You’ve made it bad enough.” Another sob escaped me. “You would have been here. You shouldn’t have gone back early.”

“Jeez.” A sharp sigh on the other end. “Well, what did you want me to do? I’m doing this for my sanity. I’m doing this for us.”

“And by doing that for us, you did this to us.” I had no idea what that even meant as I said it. I was starting to get woozy, dizzy from the emotions spiraling through me.

Brian fell silent for a long moment. When he spoke, it was in that deadly tone he’d used with me on Christmas night, where every word seemed very, very careful and very, very dangerous. “Let’s think about something for a minute,” he said slowly. “Five minutes before I decided to come back here, you told me you didn’t want to marry me.” I mumbled that I hadn’t exactly said that, but he didn’t seem to hear me. “You know, you didn’t want to move in. It was like pulling teeth to get you to move there at all. I don’t know what you want, Meg.”

“Well, what can I say? I guess I suck. And you knew that.” My heart was racing with fear now. “Where are you going with this?”

He paused again. His voice was shaking again, but it was deadlier than ever. “Did you even want to be pregnant?”

The force of my instant, incoherent anger propelled me to my feet. Fire roared through me. My incision pulled and protested, the incision that came from losing, yes, for God’s sake, I’d say it if he insisted, my baby.

“Fuck you, Brian!” I shouted. “Do you know how fucking insane you sound right now? I didn’t go to the hospital for funsies yesterday! I had fucking surgery! I could have fucking died! And you – you —“

I couldn’t finish. Before I could stop myself, I ended the call and hurled the phone into the floor. It bounced hard off the carpet and landed face down, the new purple case a bold splash against the gray.

I screamed in anger and frustration, grabbing a pillow off the couch and drop-kicking it. I punched the back of the couch. I didn’t care what the neighbors heard. I wanted to pick up my kitchen chair and smash it into the wall, but I thought the doctor might frown on that.

Finally, I sank into the sofa. I was exhausted suddenly, as if I’d run a marathon. Tears surged up through my chest, and a sob escaped me. I collapsed into the remaining pillow and let them drain out of me.

What in God’s name had just happened? Who were these people? What had they done with us?

The floor buzzed. “I just want you to know that I’ve been fighting to let you go…” Damn it all. Now I had to answer. I slid off the couch, a bag of bones on the floor, and pulled the phone closer to me with my foot.

“What?” I said when I picked it up, more angrily than I’d expected. Clearly I was less prepared for this call than I’d thought.

“I’m coming home.” Brian sounded exhausted, too.

“The fuck you are,” I snapped.

“What do you want me to do?” His tone matched mine.

I drew in a deep breath. I wasn’t sure what would come out the next time I opened my mouth, but when I did, a surprising calm filled me.

“I want you to stay in London,” I said, the words forming only as I spoke them. “As long as you need to. As long as it takes for you to get your head out of your ass.”

In the silence that followed, I knew there was no taking back the unbelievable words that had just come out of my mouth.

“W…what are you trying to say?” Brian sounded shocked.

“I want you to fuck off,” I blurted out, and ended the call before I could change my mind.